


The Nationless

by dreamofroses



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Timeline, Dysfunctional Family, Eventual Romance, F/M, Fire Nation Royal Family, The Search Comics (Avatar), secret civilization
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-01-25
Updated: 2019-01-25
Packaged: 2019-10-16 01:36:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,656
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17540216
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dreamofroses/pseuds/dreamofroses
Summary: An alternative to The Search. Just before giving in and turning to his sister for help, Zuko finds a lead that takes him and the (partial) Gaang to a small Earth Kingdom town called Ei Lia, where the might find more than Zuko's missing mother.





	The Nationless

**Author's Note:**

> This story has been bopping around in my head since it was revealed that Zuko's mother was missing back in 2006 but it has taken this long for it to gel in black and white. I know where the story is going in broad strokes but the details are fluid, so updates may be sporadic. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

The city of Ei Lia was bordered on its north side by a great, dense forest and on its east side by a former Fire Nation colony.

The city’s population was almost entirely Earth Kingdom but its official designation was up for grabs since the creation of the Republic of Nations almost a year prior. As for the inhabitants, they were not fond of the Fire Nation, had fought hard to keep themselves free from the Fire Nation colony, and were perfectly content to continue belonging to the Earth Kingdom. Signs on the road to the former colony still reminded travelers that they were leaving Earth territory.

The forest technically belonged to the Earth Kingdom as well, but there wasn’t much that could be done for policing the land. It was a thieves forest and it was determined to remain a thieves forest, free from the control of any one nation or another. The inhabitants of the forest were not well-known and were rarely seen but it was legend among the city-dwellers how much they hated intruders. The signs on that road, therefore, reminded people that the forest was full of thieves and brigands and that anyone entering it was taking their lives into their own hands.

Two young women walked the road from the forest to the city.

The woman who walked in front was named Rin. She was tall and slender and moved with a deliberate grace that bespoke some form of physical training, either bending or martial. She was dressed in a dark green shirt and pants with wrapping at her calves and forearms. Over this, she wore a flowing pale green robe, embroidered with pink flowers, open.Her right arm was in a sling. Her hair was long and glossy black and she wore it pinned tightly in a chignon at the nape of her neck with a jade-ended stick. Her features were pale and sharp, giving her a sort of cold, aristocratic beauty.

The second woman was Fuu. She was small and delicate of build. She wore a dress with a flared skirt and pants underneath, all in a pale greenish blue. She wore her brown hair in braids coiled on her head an decorated with a butterfly pin. Her features were over-sized in a doll-like way. She walked beside an ostrich horse which pulled a cart full of miniature orange gliders.

They passed the signs warning people going the other way of the danger they were approaching, they passed the city gate where they greeted the gatekeeper cheerfully, and then they made their way to the market street. There, they found an open space and pulled the cart into it.

“I guess this is us,” Fuu said. She looked around at the bare space surrounded by the colorful tents of the other vendors.

“I’m sorry, Fuu,” Rin replied. “I should have gotten us a booth or something.”

“No, no,” Fuu said. “This is better. This way the kids can try out the gliders before they buy them. They look so much cooler in action than just lying around. No one will be able to resist.” She shot Rin a big grin and Rin replied with a small smile.

“If you’re sure.” Rin looked up at the bright, cloudless sky. “At least it doesn’t look like rain. Do you think you can set up shop by yourself? I’ll take the ostrich horse to the stable, then I’ll go get the goods ordered from the merchants if you can.”

“I’m fine by myself,” Fuu answered.

“Good. I’ll be back in a couple hours.”

Rin unhooked the ostrich horse from the cart and led it away while Fuu observed her space one more time. Then Fuu removed a large blanket from the cart and laid it out over the ground. She began placing the gliders on it, arranged according to size and shape.

 

Just after lunch, Fuu found her shop to be the most popular with the children. It was so popular that parents seemed to have mistaken it for a daycare and left their children there unsupervised. Little did they know that Fuu would be hitting them up for all the gliders their children had broken when they returned.

Fuu did not mind so very much watching the children throw the gliders through the air, though. It was like watching a mini-airshow and guided her imagination to thoughts of what it must have been like to see the airbenders circling the great Air Temples. Oh, what she would give to have been born just one hundred fifty years ago.

A glider flew past her head and reminded her of the present and the children running amok in her area.

“Hey! What did I say about throwing the gliders toward the street?” she demanded, scanning the crowd to see if anyone had been hit by the errant glider.

The glider was in the hands of a slender teenager with large grey eyes. He was examining the glider avidly but his girlfriend looked less enthused with the situation. She was looking in Fuu’s direction with an expression of supreme displeasure. Then she began walking toward Fuu’s area. Fuu felt a chill run down her spine and wondered what her chances might be if she ran away.

“Hey,” the girlfriend said. “You need to be more careful with these things. You can’t just go throwing them wherever you want. Someone could get hurt.”

“Yeah,” Fuu replied. “I’m really, really sorry about that. It was an accident. But, you know, if you got hurt, I’d be happy to compensate you.” How much would that take out of her savings? How much longer until she could visit Enzo?

“No, that’s not necessary,” the boyfriend said, joining his girlfriend just a little late. He elbowed her not so subtly. “No one got hurt. But, uh, did you make these?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah. Do you like them?”

“They’re amazing,” the boyfriend said. “But where’d you get the design?”

“I made it up myself,” Fuu said.

“Yourself?” the boyfriend asked, surprised. “They’re a lot like the gliders the Air Nomads used to have.”

Fun shrugged uncomfortably. “I based them on descriptions I heard of the Avatar’s glider—the original one, not the new one I hear he’s been using these days…but how do you know what Air Nomad gliders look like?”

It was the boyfriend’s turn to look uncomfortable. He glanced at his girlfriend, then looked around. The children had run off and there was no one in the immediate vicinity. He pulled off his hat to reveal a shaved head with the distinctive blue arrow tattoo of an Air Nomad. Then he quickly crammed his hat back on.

“You’re the Avatar,” Fuu said, then took a couple deep, stabilizing breaths.

“Yeah, but don’t spread it around,” he said. “We’re kind of on a secret mission.”

“Uh…huh,” Fuu said, still stunned.

“Aang,” the girlfriend said. “We don’t have time for this. We’re supposed to be finding a place to stay for the night.”

“Right…” Aang said. “But…” He turned the miniature glider over in his hands.

“There’s an inn just down the street,” Fuu said. “But good luck getting a room. It’s festival season. It might help if you play the Avatar card, though. If you decide you want to buy one of my gliders later, you can always come back. I’ll be here all week.” She smiled as brightly as she knew how and held out her hand to take the errant glider back.

 

Rin walked the streets of the city alone. Finding a stable that would rent to her for a week had been more difficult than she had anticipated. It wasn’t that she roused suspicion in the stable owners, most knew her quite well since she had been coming to town every few months for the past seven years. It was simply festival season and the traveling entertainers had filled them up with their various beasts of burden.

Now, it was her duty to speak with the merchants about purchasing supplies but every food stall she passed reminded her with a deep pang in her stomach that she had not eaten anything since her breakfast before dawn. She knew it was best to get the goods ordered early; the quantity would mean that many of the merchants would request time to gather the products. Yet, that meat bun was calling her name…loudly and insistently.

She clutched the front of her shirt with her right hand as she wavered. How long would it take to eat a meat bun anyway? Ordering goods could wait five minutes? Right? She drifted to the side of the street with the meat bun vendor and she shuffled to a halt in front of it.

“One meat bun,” she said.

The vendor selected a plump bun and wrapped it up for her. As he handed it to her, he held out his hand for the money.

“That will be…” The vendor lost the train of his sentence.

At that moment, Rin was hit by a gust of wind that caused her outer robe to flutter about her. Her hand went to the place on her belt where she kept her purse and felt nothing. She turned in the direction the gust of wind had led and saw a scrawny boy a little younger than her running away at full tilt.

“Do you want to die?” she yelled and took off after him, leaving her meat bun behind.

Although her one arm was bound up in the sling, throwing off her balance, Rin was light on her feet and she quickly gained on the kid. He began to duck and weave, throwing obstacles in her path. She dodged and jumped, evading everything he threw at her.

“I’m gonna kill you when I catch you!” she howled. “I mean it!”

He pushed a cart in her way and she jumped over it. As she landed, a passerby stepped into her path. With no time to correct her direction, she stumbled and skidded into him. Her momentum forced them both to the ground and the passerby cried out as his head hit the cobblestones of the street. Rin leaped up and looked around but the thief was no longer anywhere to be seen. She turned to the passerby.

“What do you think you were doing?” she demanded.

“What was _I_ doing?” the passerby asked back as he stood and brushed off his clothes. “You’re the one who was running through the street like a crazy person.”

The first thing Rin noticed about him was his scar. She hated that she did that because that was not the sort of person she wanted to be but she had never seen anything quite like it—not on anyone so young and otherwise handsome. Nearly half of this stranger’s face was swallowed in the red, wrinkled skin of a burn scar. She stopped just short of staring.

He was about Rin’s age, or maybe a little older, and just taller than her. His clothes were baggy and clearly meant to hide his well-trained body, which Rin had only detected because of how solid he had felt to run into. A thick mop of black hair covered much of the top half of his face but his eyes could be seen, the one narrowed in frustration, the other by the scar.

“Look,” Rin said, “you would be, too, if some thief took all of your money.”

And it was, too. It was all of her money for meat buns and for supplies. She had been entrusted with that money to buy the things her people sorely needed and could not make in the forest. Now, what would they do? What would she tell them? That she had been careless? That she was not good enough for the essential role they had bestowed upon her? That she was a failure? Suddenly, her arm hurt her very much. She wanted to go home and cry.

“Are you all right?” the stranger asked.

Rin heard, “Are you going to cry?” instead. She screwed up her face and fought her threatening tears even harder. “No,” she answered. Then she noticed that his gaze was angled down at her sling. “Oh, no, this is fine. It happened a long time ago. I just wear this so I don’t try to use it…’cause I can’t.” Rin used her left arm to adjust how her right arm lay in the sling.

“Oh,” the stranger said, looking away and shifting his weight uncomfortably. “I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Rin replied. “It’s not like you did it. I’m Rin, by the way.”

“I’m…ah…Lee,” the stranger said.

“Right,” Rin said. She was unconvinced, but she didn’t care enough to push it. If he was lying about his name, that was his business. “Well, I’d better get back to my friend and tell her we’re broke.”

“Well, let me walk you back to your friend,” Lee said. “I was partially at fault for you losing the thief, after all.”

“Thanks,” Rin replied, “but I don’t need it.”

“I insist.”

Rin sighed. “It’s not like I can stop you from following me if that’s what you really want to do.” She began walking toward Fuu’s stand.

 

“You will never guess who just stopped by our stall!” Fuu said when Rin and Lee arrived.

“Who?” Rin asked, keeping her tone light.

“Uh…who’s your boyfriend?” Fuu asked in return.

“This is Lee,” Rin answered. “We had a little accident by the food stalls.”

Fuu gasped. “He’s not here to extort money out of us, is he?”

“No,” Rin and Lee said in unison.

“I just wanted to walk her back here,” Lee explained.

“Why? Is it because of her arm?” Fuu asked.

“No,” Lee answered.

“Because it’s not cute or nice if it was. How would you like it if I defined you by your scar? Huh, Scarface?”

“I just said it wasn’t!” Lee was clearly peeved now and, although it didn’t seem that he would act on his irritation, Rin stepped between them. She didn’t really know Lee, after all.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “She’s not normally like this.” She turned to Fuu. “What’s wrong?”

Fuu shifted her weight back and forth. “Well, I’m not really supposed to say this because he’s on a mission, but the Avatar came here.”

“Wow,” Rin said.

“I just…it felt _wrong_ that I am selling these gliders after I met him,” Fuu said. “Like I’m taking advantage of his culture or something.”

“He didn’t like them?”

“No, he said they were really cool. Still… I don’t know. But I’ll never see Enzo again if I can’t pull together enough cash, you know?”

Rin went a little pale. “Uh. About that. Do you think…that it would be possible…just a little bit…that we could dip into your savings…because I lost all of the money I got from the village to buy supplies?”

“You _what_?” Fuu demanded. “ _How_ do you just _lose_ that kind of money?”

“I was pickpocketed.”

“ _Pickpocketed_?” Fuu sighed. “You know I don’t have that money, Rin.”

“I know, I know,” Rin replied. “I’m not asking for all of it. Just enough to pay for the stable and one night at the inn. First thing in the morning we’ll go back to the village and I can explain what happened.”

“And I lose my prime spot during festival season,” Fuu said.

“I’m sorry, Fuu. I know how much this meant to you.”

“If you knew, you wouldn’t have let yourself get pickpocketed,” Fuu answered.

Lee coughed uncomfortably.

“Oh, right, you,” Rin said. “I suppose you need a room at the inn, too. Come on, I’ll take you there.” She turned to Fuu. “I’ll make sure our room is still reserved. Is there anything you want me to drop off there for you?”

“Just go,” Fuu answered.

 


End file.
